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The use of nuclear weapons will grow increasingly likely by 2025, US intelligence warned Thursday in a report on global trends that forecasts a tense, unstable world shadowed by war. "The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over scarce resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons," said the report.

Critics hope that, without water, plans for Utah's first nuclear power plant will evaporate. To that end, they recently filed formal protests with the State Engineer's office aimed at stopping the Kane County Water Conservancy District from preserving its right to 29,600 acre-feet of water already under lease by the reactor's developers.

HITTING HOME: Radioactive trail from Otis lift buttons leads to foundry on city outskirts Vipras Castings Ltd, tucked away in Khopoli, some 70 km from Pune, is coping with one bit of international exposure it could have well done without. The source of its discomfort is a revelation last month that buttons installed in some 500 Otis elevators in France were radaioactive. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) has traced the radioactive scrap metal to Vipras.

A GRANDMA for peace was arrested yet again after protesting against weapons of mass destruction. Veteran campaigner Joan Meredith, 79, from Malpas, was taking part in the CND/Trident Ploughshares Big Blockade at the Aldermaston nuclear plant in Berkshire when she was arrested on Monday last week. She was later charged with obstructing the highway. She has been ordered to appear at Reading court on December 12.

A Newspoll survey conducted by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has revealed that 40% of Australians are against the export of Australian uranium to any country for use in nuclear power plants for electricity generation. A further 22% were found to be against the export of uranium to countries that possess nuclear weapons, even if those countries have signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Focusing our efforts on nuclear power distracts us from concentrating on energy efficiency and renewable energy - alternatives that provide the safest, cleanest and most dependable means to securing our energy future. We have the ability to meet our energy needs and have a clean and healthy state without nuclear power. If Idaho's leaders scrutinized the drawbacks of nuclear reactors and contrasted those drawbacks with the benefits of energy efficiency, conservation and renewables, Idaho wouldn't be so quick to jump on the nuclear band wagon.

I'd been trying unsuccessfully, in recent weeks, to catch up with Congressman Zach Wamp to see what he thought of the Obama administration's apparent push to move the Nuclear Weapons Complex out of the Dept.of Energy and over to the Dept. of Defense. Few members of Congress are more intimately knowledgeable of the nuclear weapons program than Wamp, and he's been a big supporter, in part because of the Y-12 warhead plant in his home district. On Friday, at an event at Y-12's New Hope Center, I had a few minutes to talk with Wamp, and I asked him for his position on relocating the weapons program to DOD. "Well, that is the $64,000 question right now," he said.

Gov. James Douglas vetoed a bill Friday that would have required the owner of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant to make financial guarantees that it has the money to shut down and clean up the site. Douglas, who vetoed a similar bill passed by the Vermont Legislature last year, wrote in his four-page veto message that if this proposal was enacted, the state would likely be sued for breach of contract and electrical rates for residents would rise.